Carl-haters got a special treat tonight, as the
sheriff-hat-wearing lad managed to be awful to and at pretty much everything
— he's shitty to Rick and shitty at dealing with zombies. But his general
ineptitude is the highlight of The Walking Dead's mid-season four premiere, a
quiet episode that didn't offer much else.

First, a caveat. In my recap of The Walking Dead's
mid-season finale last year, I may have gushed (I totally gushed) about the action-packed, high stakes, immensely
jaw-dropping finale, calling it the greatest achievement of the human race. I
now realize I was a bit overexcited at finally seeing The Walking Dead reach its full potential, and give us what was easily the best episode since
the premiere, and surpassing it in a great many ways. Did it make TWD great?
No, but it was excellent and gave me a great deal of hope for the show's future.

HOLY SHIT. The rematch between Rick and the Governor arrived not with a bang, but with several…
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I feel like AMC's habit of splitting up seasons did not do
last night's episode, "After," any good; it was a quiet episode, focused only
on Rick and Carl and Michonne, with lots of silence, a few character moments,
but mostly the basics of survival that Rick et al. had hoped they'd left behind
when they moved into the prison. Had it aired the week after "Too Far Gone," it
would have been far more palatable; three months later, it just seems slow.

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Rick and Carl flee the prison. Rick is fucked up — and this
isn't me and my regular penchant for profanity, I'm pretty sure his condition
is medically known as "fucked up." He can barely walk or breathe. Carl,
meanwhile, is angry. He's angry at the loss of Judith, he's angry at the loss
of Herschel and everyone else, he's angry at the loss of his life at the
prison, he's angry because his life is terrible, and because he has no one else
to focus this anger on, he takes it out on his dad.

Rick handles this anger by basically passing out for two
days once they find a home they can break into. It's a good call, because he
doesn't have to see Carl get into two preposterously dangerous zombie
situations, both thanks to his stupidity and panic under pressure: the first time he
decides to lure two zombies away from their house and immediately backs into another one;
the second is a zombie bursting from a door he opened that he was ostensibly
expecting a zombie to pop out of. He barely avoids getting bitten both times.

Being unconscious, Rick also doesn't have to hear Carl
berate him for failing to protect everyone, for failing to take care of the
Governor earlier, for bothering to farm when he should have prepared for war. He even
yells "I'd be fine if you died." It's the most normal thing in the world for a
hormonal teenage boy with any kind of problem to blame his parents, and
what Carl has endured has earned him all the temper tantrums in the world.
However, his petulance makes him seem far more childish than his years, as does
his massive, repeated incompetence in this episode. He's got plenty to be
legitimately upset about, but he could also be a little realistic about his
situation and his skills, and this episode could have featured this conflict
without it being so shallow or Carl being so horrible.

The cherry on Carl's delightful sundae of wretchedness is
when Rick finally wakes up and does his best zombie impression. The panicked
Carl picks up his gun as his father crawls towards him (and to be fair to Carl,
Rick should probably know better than to crawl slowly towards anybody while wheezing and not
speaking) until Carl cries and fails to shoot his dad and Rick
finally mutters something intelligible. There's no way Rick was going to die,
which robs all the drama out of the moment — so we know Carl may be about to shoot his living dad, which isn't
dramatic as much as it makes Carl look even dumber.

The other member this episode follows is Michonne, who had a
bit of a meltdown after the events of the prison. After getting two more pets —
i.e., zombies whose arms and lower jaws she's chopped off, rendering them more or
less docile and which keep other zombies from noticing her for some reason (and
by the way, why doesn't EVERYBODY have some of these now) — she sets off, but not
before stabbing Herschel's decapitated, zombified head on her way out.

Basically, she just wanders around in the middle of a zombie herd,
while taking a long enough break to go to sleep and have a nightmare about her
pre-apocalypse life, including her brother, her lover, her young child (the men
being her original two "pets," and her child being very conspicuously gone).
It's a nice look at Michonne's origins, but the dream sequence is so obvious
and weird — they keep talking about how some movie (art show?) was too pretentious,
but they sound really pretentious about it themselves, and it makes it hard to
get too worked up about what Michonne has lost, even though they show — with help from a Michonne soliloquy later on — that her "lover" killed himself
because he couldn't handle it anymore.

Eventually, Michonne kind of snaps out of her fugue state
and realizes she's walking in the middle of a herd of zombies, and kills them
all (including her pets), and heads back to some footprints she passed by a day
or two ago. These are actually Rick and Carl's tracks, and she follows them
almost directly to the house Rick and Carl stopped at and rings the doorbell.
Rick looks through the peephole — because a guess a zombie could have bumped
into it — and laughs, and tells Carl, "It's for you."

There's not much going on here, but some of it works. Seeing
Rick and Carl scramble to survive like they did before Herschel's farm is a
great reminder of the life they lost with the prison, and really emphasizes the
consequences of the last episode. Watching Carl discover a flatscreen TV that
won't turn on and videogames he can't play — a brief second of joy when he
thinks about his old life, then the crushing realization that it's gone for
good — is fantastic. I never mind the basic survival stuff — that's what this
show is, about how people survive and they choose to survive (or not) but Rick is
unconscious, Michonne is practically unconscious, which leaves Carl to carry the episode, and he seems
like he's trying for Joffrey's crown as Most Unlikable Boy on TV.

It wasn't great, that's for sure. I assume next week focuses
on other survivors, so let's see how a Carl-less episode is before we start
panicking.

Assorted Musings:

• Tonight's episode was written by TWD's comic creator Robert
Kirkman. I really haven't read any of Kirkman's comics other than Marvel
Zombies, but I wonder how many of Carl's terribleness came from the script. I
mean, Chandler Riggs isn't exactly Laurence Olivier, but I don't know how much
Olivier could have done with two scenes of gross zombie-fighting incompetence.

• Tonight was the motherlode of obnoxious Carl lines. "Shane
taught me. Remember him?" "I'd be fine if you died." "I was careful." NO YOU
WEREN'T, CARL. I WAS WATCHING.

• Michonne had a doppel-zombie in her herd. I thought that was
clever.

• The scene of Carl eating a 112-oz. can of pudding desperately needed a scene following it of Carl vomiting up 105-oz. of pudding.

• Nothing sums up this episode better than this gif of Carl
completely failing to shove open a door. It was also the episode's highlight.